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“Be sure to pick yo’se’f out one which ain’t been pampered,” was Bill Tilghman’s parting shot.

“Nummine dat part,” retorted Red Hoss. “You jes’ remember dis after I’m gone: Mules’ niggers an’ niggers’ mules is ’bout to go out of style in dis man’s town.”

In a way of speaking, Red Hoss in his final taunt had the rights of it. Lumbering drays no longer runneled with their broad iron tires the red-graveled flanks of the levee leading down to the wharf boats. They had given way almost altogether to bulksome motor trucks. Closed hacks still found places in funeral processions, but black chaser craft, gasoline driven and snorting furiously, met all incoming trains and sped to all outgoing ones. Betimes, beholding as it were the handwriting on the wall, that enterprising liveryman, Mr. Lee Farrell, had set up a garage and a service station on the site of his demolished stable, and now was the fleet commander of a whole squadron of these tin-armored destroyers.

Under his tutelage Red Hoss proved a reasonably apt pupil. At the end of an apprenticeship covering a fortnight he matriculated into a regular driver, with a badge and a cap to prove it and a place on the night shift. Red Hoss felt impressive, and bore himself accordingly. He began taking sharp turns on two wheels. He took one such turn too many. On Friday night of his first week as a graduate chauffeur he steered his car headlong into a smash-up from which she emerged with a dished front wheel and a permanent marcel wave in one fender. As he nursed the cripple back to the garage Red Hoss exercised an imagination which never yet had failed him, and fabricated an explanation so plausibly shaped and phrased as to absolve him of all blameful responsibility for the mishap.

Mr. Farrell listened to and accepted this account of the accident with no more than a passing exhibition of natural irritation; but next morning when Attorney Sublette called, accompanied by an irate client with a claim for damages sustained to a market wagon, and bringing with him also the testimony of at least two disinterested eye-witnesses to prove upon whose shoulders the fault must rest, Mr. Farrell somewhat lost his customary air of sustained calm. Cursing softly under his breath, he settled on the spot with a cash compromise; and then calling the offender to his presence, he used strong and bitter words.

“Look here, boy,” he proclaimed, “I’ve let you off this time with a cussing, but next time anything happens to a car that you are driving you’ve got to come clean with me. It ain’t to be expected that a lot of crazy darkies can go sky-hooting round this town driving pot-metal omnibuses for me without one of them getting in a smash-up about every so often, and I’m carrying accident insurance and liability insurance to cover my risks; but next time you get into a jam I want you to come through with the absolute facts in the case, so’s I’ll know where I stand and how to protect myself in court or out of it. I don’t care two bits whose fault it is–your fault or some other lunatic’s fault. The truth is what I want–the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God. And He’ll need to help you if I catch you lying again! Get me?”

“Boss,” said Red Hoss fervently, “I gits you.”

Two nights later the greater disaster befell. It was a thick, drizzly, muggy night, when the foreground of one’s perspective was blurred by the murk and when there just naturally was not any background at all. Down by the Richland House a strange white man wearing a hand-colored mustache and a tiger-claw watch charm hailed Red Hoss. This person desired to be carried entirely out of town, to the south yards of the P. T. & A. Railroad, where Powers Brothers’ Carnival Company was detraining from its cars with intent to pitch camp in the suburb of Mechanicsville hard by and furnish the chief attractions for a three days’ street fair to be given under the auspices of the Mechanicsville lodge of Knights of Damon.